Fifty-five years after publishing her iconic, best-selling novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, famed for being a recluse, announced that she'll be publishing a follow up novel this July.

But what took the legendary novelist that long to come up with her second novel?

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Lee has seldom shared the reasons why she decided not to write another book. Lee mentioned a long time ago that she considered the publicity following the release of To Kill a Mockingbird too much to bear and that she already told what she wanted to tell the world in that single work.

Scholars long had the idea that Lee already wrote an earlier manuscript, although they thought that was just a mere draft of Mockingbird.

The book's publisher, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, wants to publish about two million copies of the new book, which is slated for release on July 14.

However, there were some who questioned the deal, and even raised the issue of whether or not Lee, who is now in an assisted-living facility following a stroke in 2007, had actually played a significant role in hatching the deal.  Her sister,  lawyer, companion, and protector from public scrutiny, Alice, passed away just last year.

Even Lee's close friend, Marja Mills, wondered if Lee even had an active involvement in the publishing deal.

A HarperCollins executive said that the company had communicated exclusively with her lawyer, Ms. Carter, and her literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg.  Also, the book's original manuscript would remain as is .

Lee actually finished writing the book, titled Go Set a Watchman, in the mid-1950s, at the height of the civil rights movement.  

The plot happens around two decades after the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird. While many hailed it as a great follow up to Mockingbird, Lee actually wrote the sequel before Mockingbird.

The 304-page novel was still set in the same fictional town of Maycomb, Ala., and begins with Scout Finch, the strong willed child heroine of To Kill a Mockingbird paying a visit to her father, Atticus.

In a statement released by her publisher, Lee narrates the story to her editor with the story of Scout's childhood flashbacks, and told her to write a different novel from Scout's perspective.

"I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told," the 88-year-old native of Monroeville, Ala., said in the statement.

The book eventually ended up as the hugely successful To Kill a Mockingbird, which is now hailed as one of the finest literary classics of its era, winning the Pulitzer Prize and selling over 40 million copies in 1960 alone. In 1962 it was adapted into a motion picture. To this day, Mockingbird sells for about one million copies every year and is already available in over 40 languages worldwide, a popular must-read piece in literature classes.

Following Mockingbird, Lee never published another novel, living a reclusive life afterwards and rarely granting interviews. However, she changed her mind recently and agreed to release Mockingbird's sequel.

"After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years," Lee said in a statement.

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